Read Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) for Free Online Page A

was only one thing he really had to remember, and that was that he had the right to remain silent.

 
    PART ONE

 
    ONE
    1
    Somewhere back in the mists of time, Gregor Demarkian had trained to be an accountant. First he had taken a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. That had sounded very practical to his parents, who were immigrants from Armenia and heavily invested in making sure their children had careers that could carry them in America. Gregor never had the heart to tell them that academic economics was not the same thing as a business degree. To this day, he wasn’t sure what it was most of his professors had been getting at. Whether they were socialist or capitalist, mercantilist or Marxist, they all seemed to be living in cloud-cuckoo-land, where “rational actors” and “historical forces” bumped about the landscape doing things no actual existing human being would ever do, “inevitably” coming to conclusions that contradicted everybody else’s inevitability.
    After college, Gregor went on to the Harvard Business School, where he’d been given an MBA that should have been spectacularly practical. He’d been enabled to go by the Armenian American Professional Fund, which was set up by an earlier generation of immigrants than that of his parents, dedicated to turning Armenian Americans into doctors and lawyers and that kind of thing.
    “We can’t go on and on with the rugs,” the secretary of the fund explained to him when he’d gone by to pick up an application. “It’s embarrassing. It’s a stereotype. Nobody wants to be a stereotype.”
    Gregor had been a contrarian even then, and something in the back of his mind observed that not only did everybody rely on stereotypes to get by in everyday life, but that it could sometimes be to your own advantage to be taken as one. Fortunately, he’d had too much sense actually to say that. He’d just taken the papers home, filled them out, and sent them in. Two months later, his tuition at Harvard was covered.
    His father thought he’d been in school long enough already, but his mother was very pleased. “They take you very seriously,” she’d said. “You want to be taken seriously.”
    Gregor supposed he did want to be taken seriously, but at the moment, it was mostly a side issue. He’d done well at Wharton, and while he was doing very well, he had assumed that he would spend his life after graduating working for some enormous corporation, or for one of the Big Eight accounting firms. He’d had his sights set on Arthur Andersen when the man from the FBI showed up at a recruitment day.
    From the moment he met the man from the FBI, he’d been hooked.
    The problem as things now stood was that, although the FBI had hired him because he was an accountant—in those days, the FBI preferred its recruits to be either lawyers or accountants—it hadn’t ever really used his expertise in accountancy.
    Part of that was his own damned fault. He’d graduated. He’d been sent off to get enough experience to be certified. He’d trained at Quantico. In no time at all, he was able to see that the really interesting work in the Bureau had to do with bodies.
    For a while after that, Gregor kept up his certification and made some effort to keep up with accounting. But it was only for a while. Kidnapping detail had given way to murder investigations on Indian reservations and then to the early days of the Behavioral Sciences Unit. And after that, Elizabeth got sick with breast cancer.
    Gregor could not remember a time when he had been sorry that his career went the way it had gone. Until now. Now he was sitting at the Federal Reserve, waiting for an appointment and sifting through computer files. He had been sifting through these files for several weeks, and they still didn’t make even a modicum of sense.
    He was rapidly reaching the conclusion that they were not making sense, because they could not be made sense of.
    He heard a discreet